What is a Shopping Cart and How Does it Work?
January 28, 2009
An e-commerce business needs several things in order to be successful: traffic, traffic and more traffic. In short, you need customers in order to start making money. And when you’re customers are shopping on your site, they want to be able to manage the purchases that they are willing to make – this done with the help of a shopping cart.
If you’ve ever shopped online (and who hasn’t?), you’ve dealt with a shopping cart at one point or another. In fact, you probably don’t even notice them anymore. You choose the items you want to buy; they’re gathered on a list until you’re ready to hand over your credit card information. The shopping cart also allows the customer to search for items that they would like to purchase on your website. The cart is an invaluable tool for helping your customers shop with you.
To understand how to set up a shopping cart, you should learn the basics of how it works. There are a number of different software versions that a shopping cart can use: ASP, Perl, CGI, or Cold Fusion. Each has its own merits and disadvantages. Some allow customers to save their shopping cart contents for extended periods of time, while others do not. Basically, these shopping carts will include three things:
• A place to store information – that is, a database of the order details (this can include Microsoft SQL, MySQL, or Microsoft Access and more).
• A storefront – what the customer sees in their shopping cart and as they shop
• Administration – this is where you manage your store’s website to process the orders that you receive before they go to a merchant provider or direct them to an authentication service like preCharge.
Setting up a shopping cart can be as simple as utilizing features that your merchant account provider can give you as a part of their services with you, or you can purchase shopping cart software that works independently of their process – it’s up to you. When you’re using a third party payment processor instead of a merchant account provider, you will generally have the shopping cart feature included, with the need to just add a link to your business website.
You want to make sure that you are choosing a shopping cart process that allows you to quickly and easily put in the HTML or details about your products so that they can be easily found and accessed by your customers. To do this, you will want to try out several shopping cart providers to see what works best for your needs. You will also want to look for a shopping cart that does not limit you to preformatted templates as this can limit the overall visual effect on your website – and the kind of look that you’re trying to achieve.
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I agree traffic is now half the battle, if not, more. Internet marketing and ecommerce go hand in hand. It is not enough to just put up a store on the Internet anymore - you have to engage in some level of Internet Marketing or at the very least, onpage SEO.